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Speech Acts
In this book, the words are tough. A “hitman of prosody” comes after you and threatens to break your kneecaps if you don’t read the poem all the way through. But the words are also sexual as McCullough turns from violence to one of her favorite topics: blow jobs.
70 pages, Paperback
First published July 20, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 23, 2011
And Laura McCullough Can Be Naughty....
It is difficult to find a poet as smart and as sensible and as gifted as Laura McCullough to have the energy and the daring to explore the words that act as intercourse between the reader and the writer. SPEECH ACTS radiates fine writing - as we have all come to expect from McCullough ('Panic', Women And Other Hostages', etc) - but is a collection of works that goes beyond where she has been before. As one person put it 'Located in the nexus of mind and body, the poems in SPEECH ACTS use language as a weapon, a tool, a sex toy, a map, a love letter and argue with alternate provocation and tenderness that language is the sexiest and most intimate mode of intercourse that humans have'. I like that description. It is as though she wrote it herself, but surely she didn't because she is far to busy searching out those places and words where she can surprise us with her fecund imagination.
Many of the poems in this terrific collection are 'naughty' - if that is a word you need to categorize poems about sensual thoughts. Not all of them are directly connected to acts of lust (though some of her best ones deal extensively with oral sex, pros and cons). Sometimes she is just funny, as in the following:
IN AN ELEVATOR IN ATLANTIC CITY
It was in a hospital, and he was a doctor,
and the doors closed on his torso, bis body
in, his head out. The elevator did what elevators
do: went up. Inside, was a woman. A witness
to his decapitation. Helpless. An elevator
goes in only two directions. Recall the last
elevator you were in and if it had more
than one set of doors. The ground floor
is covered in purple fiber meant to withstand
the damage of a million soles. In the air,
the Chihuly glass chandelier testifies
to what might be possible, the cost
to the casino passed on to each of us
willing to be part of a transaction we're
sure we'll never win but hope, somehow,
we might. Do we secretly want every door
we pass through to be made of glass,
beguiling, revelatory, divine? Alone
in an elevator, anything can happen.
What Laura McCullough cannot do with words that make ideas probably cannot be done. She has a quirky nature and the facility of pen to paper that suddenly turns on a light in the dark little space we think is our private interior. Then we find she has already explored that and described it and simply blushing or looking aghast doesn't stop her. She is funny, perceptive and yes...a little naughty, too.
Grady Harp
It is difficult to find a poet as smart and as sensible and as gifted as Laura McCullough to have the energy and the daring to explore the words that act as intercourse between the reader and the writer. SPEECH ACTS radiates fine writing - as we have all come to expect from McCullough ('Panic', Women And Other Hostages', etc) - but is a collection of works that goes beyond where she has been before. As one person put it 'Located in the nexus of mind and body, the poems in SPEECH ACTS use language as a weapon, a tool, a sex toy, a map, a love letter and argue with alternate provocation and tenderness that language is the sexiest and most intimate mode of intercourse that humans have'. I like that description. It is as though she wrote it herself, but surely she didn't because she is far to busy searching out those places and words where she can surprise us with her fecund imagination.
Many of the poems in this terrific collection are 'naughty' - if that is a word you need to categorize poems about sensual thoughts. Not all of them are directly connected to acts of lust (though some of her best ones deal extensively with oral sex, pros and cons). Sometimes she is just funny, as in the following:
IN AN ELEVATOR IN ATLANTIC CITY
It was in a hospital, and he was a doctor,
and the doors closed on his torso, bis body
in, his head out. The elevator did what elevators
do: went up. Inside, was a woman. A witness
to his decapitation. Helpless. An elevator
goes in only two directions. Recall the last
elevator you were in and if it had more
than one set of doors. The ground floor
is covered in purple fiber meant to withstand
the damage of a million soles. In the air,
the Chihuly glass chandelier testifies
to what might be possible, the cost
to the casino passed on to each of us
willing to be part of a transaction we're
sure we'll never win but hope, somehow,
we might. Do we secretly want every door
we pass through to be made of glass,
beguiling, revelatory, divine? Alone
in an elevator, anything can happen.
What Laura McCullough cannot do with words that make ideas probably cannot be done. She has a quirky nature and the facility of pen to paper that suddenly turns on a light in the dark little space we think is our private interior. Then we find she has already explored that and described it and simply blushing or looking aghast doesn't stop her. She is funny, perceptive and yes...a little naughty, too.
Grady Harp
February 6, 2013
By Ryan Romine
For The Literary Review
Volume 54 "Emo, Meet Hole"
Can a man say no to a blow job? Pretend it’s not a rhetorical question. Taking honest
stock of my willpower, the mere suggestion of such an offer is undeniably arousing.
Auditory, verbal, or visual cues all do the trick. Of course, the idea of a literal, verbal
request seems unlikely; mostly because oral sex, and sex generally, usually happens
(or at least happens much better) in the realm of insinuation and consensual knowing. What’s being offered or suggested is usually already moments away from happening. And any man with a bone of honesty in his body knows that once the context
is conducive to the possibility of sex, there’s very little chance his hormones will allow
him to say no (introspective judgment rarely interferes with the penis). And yet,
admitting all this, after reading Laura McCullough’s provocative and thoughtful collection, Speech Acts, I’m tempted to reconsider.
Here’s why: sex, particularly oral sex, is McCullough’s dominant trope. Yes, she
does employ several other metaphorical devices effectively, specifically and especially
the transmutation of arcane, clinical, and/or biological terms. Yet the repetitive presence of fellatio is what the reader—male or female—comes away remembering most.
If you’re not familiar with McCullough’s work, you probably think I’m exaggerating,
that I’m being sensational. If you’re a woman, you’re probably thinking three levels
beyond me, anticipating—in shades of justified feminist suspicion—how I’m setting
up this rising star for either a chauvinistic belittling or a celebration of post-feminist
poetics. But even a casual skim through these poems shows McCullough’s oral fixation to be benign, and often tender. Over and over, blow jobs become either the main
vehicle for a seemingly deeper meditation, as in “A Dirty Poem about Oral Sex” (“there’s
a mouthful / to swallow. Holding that on my tongue, I / think of Baudrillard . . .”);
or the centerpiece metaphor operating at the core of the poem, as in “What Can
Happen in the Dunes” (There’s / a connection between the throat / and vagina;
tighten one, they both clench”). Half the time I back away slowly, carrying a kind
of motherly disregard for the shapeless men in these poems. They are often props
to pity, McCullough’s men; photo-negatives of the domineering males I’ve come to
identify and expect in the work of pioneering feminist poets.
But McCullough breaks this expectation in a way I barely noticed. The men-assexual-oppressor narrative is turned on its head, or at least on its side. Take the second poem in the collection, “Avocados,” as a prime example. The reader is introduced
to a naïve admirer of the titular Mexican fruit: “A woman next to me takes two / in
one hand, jostling them . . . She says // I never tire of avocados; if I could, I would eat
them / every day.” Then McCullough drops the innuendo:
have you ever
had a Hawaiian Sharwil? I shake my head. An avocado
milkshake, she asks? No, I say. Me neither, she says,
but I hope to one day. I nod knowingly, and it’s as if we’ve shared a secret.
What’s implied is so clear at this point, that the reader is left staring at a metaphor
that’s almost completely transparent. Here, at its apex, the reader can feel the poem
turning toward the strong influence of a Margaret Atwood or a Sharon Olds: how
the lightness will fade and a dark, complex reality will twist our heroine toward a
tragic, violent truth. Yet McCullough takes this poem to a seemingly anti-feminist
conclusion. In the final stanza she transforms the nearly date-rape gestures of a horny
teenager into an unsuspecting sharer of secrets. It makes for a strikingly odd comingof-age moment:
I recall my first one, not an avocado,
but a blow job, how the boy made me, how I wasn’t ashamed
because it was what I’d thought about in the partition
between day and night before falling asleep for years.
I was startled at how good secrets can be if handled right,
by the various names we give them, how they ripen with time.
Notice how imperceptibly McCullough steals the boy’s power (“how I wasn’t
ashamed”), making passing mention of his seeming abuse and transferring the narra-162
tive focus back on the speaker in the poem. She’s just vague enough—using the verb
“made” as opposed to “forced” or “thrust”—about the incident to allow the reader
to accept her perception of the event as a secret that is actually “good,” so long as it’s
“handled right.”
McCullough’s poems avoid polemical empowerment and instead offer sincere
tenderness as a kind of feminist jujitsu. The most vivid display of this approach is in
the poem “Meniscus: as distinct from other planets,” which carries her characteristic
undercurrent of sadness in a more robust and balanced way than almost any other
explicitly sexual poem in the collection. Playing with the implications of a meniscus
(crescent-shaped) moon, McCullough assaults the reader with an image-heavy narrative that perfectly conflates metaphor and message. It begins with the poet’s characteristic directness:
They told me what to expect
in this decade, but each month
it’s another man asking for a kiss—
to kiss me, let’s kiss—and each moon
face blooms above, behind, or across
from me as if I’ve seen it just
then for the first time, a wolf
in one, a bear in another, in the end,
always, just a man . . .
Rather than placing the speaker in a submissive or defensive pose to show the potential injustice being enacted, McCullough asserts the female speaker’s authority by
having the man ask. While this doesn’t preclude the present-day reality of sexual violence, the reader almost unconsciously assents to the subtle political shift that has—
“in this decade”—given women more agency than in decades past. The men here are
asking, not taking; and then just asking for a kiss—a rather schoolboy connotation
in and of itself. They also resemble more menacing animals initially, and then return
to being “in the end, / always, just a man.” Both the interrogative posture, along with
their reverse transmogrification from animals to mere men signals a new feminist
perspective in the gender roles of the twenty-first century: these would be rapists are
not pitiless, but pitiful (“and his face was a cave begging / for a small animal to take
harbor / in it”). And yet, the second half of the poem culminates in a sexually violent metaphor that is surprisingly consensual
I . . . went
home to my husband who splayed me
like a caught fish, bright skinned,
jumping through the meniscus of water
to air, the moon a bright-penny lure,
and he with the net, then fillets me,
my rainbow scales shedding, so our bed
is a shimmering, thin-flaked mess
The sexual aggression has been graphically transferred from the would-be philanderers to the husband, the ravishing roles reversed in a way the speaker does not cower
under but seems to revel in.
McCullough’s meditations around sex, especially oral sex, and the counternarrative she creates reveal the submissive position of the man in such scenarios. The
woman may have to take a powerless posture, but it is exactly that posture that gives
her power; power to pleasure or dismember with one swift clench. As a man, maybe
I’m uncomfortable with McCullough’s counter-narrative, with this conventional
image of power being turned on its head so many times. Maybe I’m realizing for the
first time how emotionally empty the historical posture of the male-as-dominant
sexual partner is. Maybe McCullough’s talent for radically fitting a new gender narrative around fellatio causes me confused anxiety generally as a male reader. The real
question is how will she expand her unique meme, with her narrative gift (which,
interestingly, feels very much in line with Tony Hoagland’s) to invert and transmute
our conventional notions of power generally into something disarmingly small?
After this dizzying collection, charged with literal and metaphorical blow jobs, I’m
exhausted. But my reflective powers are returning now and I’m curious. I wedge my
pillow against the headboard, and lean in attentively, ready to listen more closely,
more deeply, now that the lovemaking is over.
For more great reading
Subscribe to The Literary Review
For The Literary Review
Volume 54 "Emo, Meet Hole"
Can a man say no to a blow job? Pretend it’s not a rhetorical question. Taking honest
stock of my willpower, the mere suggestion of such an offer is undeniably arousing.
Auditory, verbal, or visual cues all do the trick. Of course, the idea of a literal, verbal
request seems unlikely; mostly because oral sex, and sex generally, usually happens
(or at least happens much better) in the realm of insinuation and consensual knowing. What’s being offered or suggested is usually already moments away from happening. And any man with a bone of honesty in his body knows that once the context
is conducive to the possibility of sex, there’s very little chance his hormones will allow
him to say no (introspective judgment rarely interferes with the penis). And yet,
admitting all this, after reading Laura McCullough’s provocative and thoughtful collection, Speech Acts, I’m tempted to reconsider.
Here’s why: sex, particularly oral sex, is McCullough’s dominant trope. Yes, she
does employ several other metaphorical devices effectively, specifically and especially
the transmutation of arcane, clinical, and/or biological terms. Yet the repetitive presence of fellatio is what the reader—male or female—comes away remembering most.
If you’re not familiar with McCullough’s work, you probably think I’m exaggerating,
that I’m being sensational. If you’re a woman, you’re probably thinking three levels
beyond me, anticipating—in shades of justified feminist suspicion—how I’m setting
up this rising star for either a chauvinistic belittling or a celebration of post-feminist
poetics. But even a casual skim through these poems shows McCullough’s oral fixation to be benign, and often tender. Over and over, blow jobs become either the main
vehicle for a seemingly deeper meditation, as in “A Dirty Poem about Oral Sex” (“there’s
a mouthful / to swallow. Holding that on my tongue, I / think of Baudrillard . . .”);
or the centerpiece metaphor operating at the core of the poem, as in “What Can
Happen in the Dunes” (There’s / a connection between the throat / and vagina;
tighten one, they both clench”). Half the time I back away slowly, carrying a kind
of motherly disregard for the shapeless men in these poems. They are often props
to pity, McCullough’s men; photo-negatives of the domineering males I’ve come to
identify and expect in the work of pioneering feminist poets.
But McCullough breaks this expectation in a way I barely noticed. The men-assexual-oppressor narrative is turned on its head, or at least on its side. Take the second poem in the collection, “Avocados,” as a prime example. The reader is introduced
to a naïve admirer of the titular Mexican fruit: “A woman next to me takes two / in
one hand, jostling them . . . She says // I never tire of avocados; if I could, I would eat
them / every day.” Then McCullough drops the innuendo:
have you ever
had a Hawaiian Sharwil? I shake my head. An avocado
milkshake, she asks? No, I say. Me neither, she says,
but I hope to one day. I nod knowingly, and it’s as if we’ve shared a secret.
What’s implied is so clear at this point, that the reader is left staring at a metaphor
that’s almost completely transparent. Here, at its apex, the reader can feel the poem
turning toward the strong influence of a Margaret Atwood or a Sharon Olds: how
the lightness will fade and a dark, complex reality will twist our heroine toward a
tragic, violent truth. Yet McCullough takes this poem to a seemingly anti-feminist
conclusion. In the final stanza she transforms the nearly date-rape gestures of a horny
teenager into an unsuspecting sharer of secrets. It makes for a strikingly odd comingof-age moment:
I recall my first one, not an avocado,
but a blow job, how the boy made me, how I wasn’t ashamed
because it was what I’d thought about in the partition
between day and night before falling asleep for years.
I was startled at how good secrets can be if handled right,
by the various names we give them, how they ripen with time.
Notice how imperceptibly McCullough steals the boy’s power (“how I wasn’t
ashamed”), making passing mention of his seeming abuse and transferring the narra-162
tive focus back on the speaker in the poem. She’s just vague enough—using the verb
“made” as opposed to “forced” or “thrust”—about the incident to allow the reader
to accept her perception of the event as a secret that is actually “good,” so long as it’s
“handled right.”
McCullough’s poems avoid polemical empowerment and instead offer sincere
tenderness as a kind of feminist jujitsu. The most vivid display of this approach is in
the poem “Meniscus: as distinct from other planets,” which carries her characteristic
undercurrent of sadness in a more robust and balanced way than almost any other
explicitly sexual poem in the collection. Playing with the implications of a meniscus
(crescent-shaped) moon, McCullough assaults the reader with an image-heavy narrative that perfectly conflates metaphor and message. It begins with the poet’s characteristic directness:
They told me what to expect
in this decade, but each month
it’s another man asking for a kiss—
to kiss me, let’s kiss—and each moon
face blooms above, behind, or across
from me as if I’ve seen it just
then for the first time, a wolf
in one, a bear in another, in the end,
always, just a man . . .
Rather than placing the speaker in a submissive or defensive pose to show the potential injustice being enacted, McCullough asserts the female speaker’s authority by
having the man ask. While this doesn’t preclude the present-day reality of sexual violence, the reader almost unconsciously assents to the subtle political shift that has—
“in this decade”—given women more agency than in decades past. The men here are
asking, not taking; and then just asking for a kiss—a rather schoolboy connotation
in and of itself. They also resemble more menacing animals initially, and then return
to being “in the end, / always, just a man.” Both the interrogative posture, along with
their reverse transmogrification from animals to mere men signals a new feminist
perspective in the gender roles of the twenty-first century: these would be rapists are
not pitiless, but pitiful (“and his face was a cave begging / for a small animal to take
harbor / in it”). And yet, the second half of the poem culminates in a sexually violent metaphor that is surprisingly consensual
I . . . went
home to my husband who splayed me
like a caught fish, bright skinned,
jumping through the meniscus of water
to air, the moon a bright-penny lure,
and he with the net, then fillets me,
my rainbow scales shedding, so our bed
is a shimmering, thin-flaked mess
The sexual aggression has been graphically transferred from the would-be philanderers to the husband, the ravishing roles reversed in a way the speaker does not cower
under but seems to revel in.
McCullough’s meditations around sex, especially oral sex, and the counternarrative she creates reveal the submissive position of the man in such scenarios. The
woman may have to take a powerless posture, but it is exactly that posture that gives
her power; power to pleasure or dismember with one swift clench. As a man, maybe
I’m uncomfortable with McCullough’s counter-narrative, with this conventional
image of power being turned on its head so many times. Maybe I’m realizing for the
first time how emotionally empty the historical posture of the male-as-dominant
sexual partner is. Maybe McCullough’s talent for radically fitting a new gender narrative around fellatio causes me confused anxiety generally as a male reader. The real
question is how will she expand her unique meme, with her narrative gift (which,
interestingly, feels very much in line with Tony Hoagland’s) to invert and transmute
our conventional notions of power generally into something disarmingly small?
After this dizzying collection, charged with literal and metaphorical blow jobs, I’m
exhausted. But my reflective powers are returning now and I’m curious. I wedge my
pillow against the headboard, and lean in attentively, ready to listen more closely,
more deeply, now that the lovemaking is over.
For more great reading
Subscribe to The Literary Review
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews